Something Akin to Culture Shock
A poem I wrote in 2018 based on my observations at the last stop of a bus tour around the city. Originally posted February 2, 2024 with small revisions.
On the last stop of the Baltimore Toxic Tour, a few one hundred feet away from a garbage dump, two buses full of Loyola students were in awe. The dirt ground, cayenne pepper powder colored and devoid of verdant blades and hearty thickets, resembled the pimpled face of a teen bracing themselves for the meteor impact of puberty. A wasteland that cannot be called a wasteland. For its open spaces find solace in an atomic horizon that is in sight. Despite nothing rewarding being at the edge, besides dirt drenched bulldozers that terraform rock and earth. Piloted by men in yellow cake crowns with leather full of change, they don’t mind the expenses of the mother they tear into everyday—a slow lobotomization. Every iPhone X, fresh off the assembly line, in the hand of nine out of ten Loyola students had a black screen with no eyes to attend to them as what was reflected in those irises was a wasteland that could not be called a wasteland at Baltimore’s dump.
Wonder still where the strength of the EPA is and super fund money went to clean up toxic waste lands that poisons earth, people, water, generations and still seeps , festers like a volcanic pimple acne infested adolescent waiting to erupt. Now tip of iceberg. What wwill T-rump do? Where will toxic waste go from Los Angeles homes, businesses, schools go? Plastic bags will hospital waste, infectious viruses haunt the world. Not to mention Gaza and debris waste land. Plastic straws suck. Recycled waste water down drain. Spent nuclear waste in ocean. The fish eaten , foods we eat sicken, been hyperbole for centuries. When rain glows down and lights streets we sill will not find our way out of the woods.
Thank you for sharing this again Daniel.